“For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people are so attracted to our family,” writes Phil Robertson. And that was before “Duck Dynasty,” the Robertson family’s reality show, smashed records for a nonfiction cable program when 11.8 million viewers checked out the season premiere in mid-August.

Phil, as nearly everyone calls him, is the bearded, 67-year-old progenitor of the backwoods Louisiana clan that made it big selling duck calls and found its way into millions of other American homes through the previous three seasons of “Duck Dynasty.”

It has all the makings of a spellbinding screenplay: A blind Chinese dissident outwits a communist regime’s thugs to escape house arrest and seek sanctuary in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Chen Guangcheng scaled walls, crossed fields, slept in a pig pen, injured a foot, and — after 17 hours — connected with an activist he’d never met who drove him toward the capital with the help of an underground network. All this under the eye of China’s domestic security system, which has a bigger annual budget than the nation’s military.

Adoption advocates hope to recruit enough parents to take in the 107,000 children in America’s foster care system who are waiting for permanent families. And it’s not just because November is National Adoption Month. For too many children, foster care has become more of a trap door than a safety net, says Thomas Atwood, former president of the National Council for Adoption.

The world recognized an international symbol of the hunger for political freedom in the summer of 2009 when a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, was fatally shot during the Tehran uprising. Now, Iran’s persecution of Yousef Nadarkhani, a young pastor sentenced to death for his Christian faith, is a chilling reminder that much of the world also yearns for religious liberty.

Firefighters from Brooklyn’s Red Hook station arrived at the Twin Towers before the second plane hit on 9/11. All seven men of Ladder 101 lost their lives that day. This summer, the city renamed part of a neighborhood street in their honor.

“Budgets are moral documents.” So religious voices, rightly, have reminded us in recent months. Now, Catholic and Protestant leaders have launched an initiative called “Circle of Protection” to make federal antipoverty spending untouchable in the conversation about how to save generations of Americans from crushing debt.